by Threes Anna
“And now a shirt,” she says with conviction, although a minute ago she decided to allow each person only one piece of clothing. She pulls out a white shirt that her husband always wore to the office.
Madan motions to the man to turn around, and looks at the shape of his shoulders and neck. Then he turns the shirt inside out and alters several seams.
When the man puts on the shirt, he looks like a hero in a film. Widow Sethi suddenly regrets that her youngest daughter has already been married off, for if she had met this young man earlier, he would certainly have been a suitable candidate. She doesn’t want to let the fisherman go, and only after a cup of tea and repeated invitations to come by sometime does she finally allow the next person in line to enter.
The woman who walks into the room is painfully thin, with straight hair that hangs half over her eyes. She tells widow Sethi that she’s lost her entire family, even her great-grandfather, and that all around the spot where her house stood there were bodies floating in the water. The bodies were so blue and swollen that they were unrecognizable, so she and other survivors from her village tried to cremate the bodies. The fire wouldn’t catch because the wood was too wet, and in the end they tapped diesel fuel from a washed-up truck and doused the bodies.
Shocked, Madan listens to her monotone voice. She speaks without a trace of emotion, as if she were reciting a lesson. Widow Sethi has tears in her eyes, and she pulls one of her wedding saris out of the cabinet: a magnificent yellow silk, with gold embroidery. The matching blouse is too large for the woman’s emaciated body, but Madan takes it in. He also shortens the sari and makes a hairband for her from the leftover material.
They hear the murmurs of admiration as she goes down the stairs. Widow Sethi hopes the fisherman is not too far away, since they would make a lovely couple. She calls the next person in line. It’s another fisherman, who lost not only his entire family, his boat, and his house, but also all of his front teeth.
“Oh, Madame,” he lisps, “can you make me just as handsome?”
Widow Sethi fears that not even the most elegant of her husband’s suits would be enough to fulfill his request, but Madan bends over his machine and continues to sew.
The fisherman with no front teeth is pleased as punch with his new outfit. After his departure an atmosphere of unrest develops. It is rumoured that there are not enough clothes to go around, and that only people who have lost their entire family are eligible. Toward the end of the line, someone mentions that the benefactress is not only giving away clothes, but also filling their pockets with money. The people in line begin to push and shove. A young widow uses her elbows to work her way up one step, and two brothers who owned a small shipyard push a rival shipbuilder in the same situation straight off the stairs. He is thrown against a shy young woman who has never been touched by a man. She begins to scream, which leads the other people in line to conclude that the handouts have come to a halt. Those at the very end of the line believe that is not only the benefactress putting money in the pockets, but also has promised them a job. The crowd of people on the street has swelled, and all of them are determined to get into the house. On the stairs, children are trampled underfoot or held high above the jumble of people. Widow Sethi tries to calm them, but when the next man leaves the house looking like a film star, the waiting mass squeezes past the widow and into the house, where they pounce upon the clothes and scour the cabinets in the hope of laying their hands on one or more garments.
Madan, focused on the fitted blouse he’s taking in, is initially unaware of the upheaval on the stairs. When the people begin to charge into the room, his first instinct is to protect his machine. He bends forward and throws both arms around the Singer. But the destitute men and women are not interested in Madan or his sewing machine. They have just caught sight of widow Sethi’s collection of saris. Greedy hands pull the colourful garments out of the cabinet. As more and more people crowd into the room, Madan feels the wooden floor begin to give way. He sees shirts and trousers being torn apart. He hears the screams and the creaking noises. He sees the cabinets start to topple. A cry of distress forms in his throat. He screams. The swarming mass of people suddenly fall silent, and they all look around in shock, searching for the roaring lion they expect to see. But there is only a man with a sewing machine in his arms.
Then they hear the clear sound of something cracking, and the floor caves in. Dust, splinters, scraps of wood, people, and clothes . . . everything comes crashing down. Madan hears a scream . . . a scream he heard once before, years ago in the prison, when Ibrahim the murderer grabbed Mister Patel by the throat because he didn’t like his face.
THE CARS WITH their wailing sirens, a sound that has become familiar in recent months, arrive in front of what was once the house of Mister Patel and widow Sethi. There is nothing left but a few broken beams and a pile of roof tiles. All the clothes are gone, snatched up before the arrival of the ambulances and police cars.
Holding his sewing machine, Madan stares at the stretcher carrying the body of Mister Patel. His pen is still in his hand. The ambulance drivers are in no hurry. The sirens are silent. Madan wants to cry, but the tears won’t come. He feels nothing. All he sees is the bloody face of the old man as he is shoved into an ambulance while the drivers discuss the final score of a cricket game. One of them picks up a piece of paper from the rubble and lays it over the disfigured face. Through a tear in the drawing of the paramecium, Madan can still see the terror-contorted mouth of the man he had come to call Father.
EVERYONE IS GONE, and a harrowing silence descends upon the street. Only Madan is left, standing in front of the collapsed house, with his sewing machine under his arm. He gazes at the closely written snippets of paper wafting away in the wake of their creator.
“Hey, you!”
Madan turns slowly in the direction of the voice.
In the door of the greengrocer’s shop opposite the house stands the proprietor. He waves to him. “Come with me.”
In front of the door there are large crates of apples. They’re just as shiny as the apple he was given by Mister Patel’s nephew. He hesitates, but then walks over to the shopkeeper.
“Don’t you want his bicycle?”
Madan looks at him inquiringly.
“You’re his son, aren’t you?”
The man dashes into the shop and comes back with an old men’s bicycle.
“Take it, please. It’s been standing in the way for years.”
1995 Rampur ~~~
THE MOON WAS almost full and shone down on the eager mouths of the buckets in the garden. There was as yet no sign of the clouds Charlotte was hoping for. However, it was not the heat that had kept her awake, but rather what had happened that evening.
They were standing at the bottom of the stairs, exhausted, when Isabella came dancing down the stairs with Father’s chamber pot, belting out “Singing in the Rain” like a full-fledged Fred Astaire. She grinned at the invisible dark clouds overhead and made it clear that the “sun was in her heart and she was ready for love!” The old chamber pot became her dance partner: she paraded from one side of the broad, once stately stairs to the other, as if she were starring in a real musical.
Hema chuckled, Madan laughed his soundless laugh, and Charlotte found herself regretting that her niece hadn’t paid them a visit before.
After the last sentence, the girl placed the chamber pot at the bottom of the stairs, looked up into the sky, and called out in a loud voice: “Now you can piss as hard as you want!” She looked cheekily at the adults in front of her. “If it doesn’t come now, then I give up,” she said triumphantly, wiping the perspiration from her forehead.
“Thank you, Miss Isabella,” said Hema, who was convinced that, as the “house on the hill,” they had done more than their duty when it came to enticing the monsoon to burst loose. If the rain didn’t come now, it wasn’t their
fault. “My name is Issy!” she called out, and made a pirouette. Charlotte didn’t know if it was deliberately or by accident, but suddenly she stopped in front of Madan and pointed to his neck: “What did you do to your neck?”
Oh, it’s nothing.
“It’s nothing,” said Charlotte, who could tell that he was startled by the sudden attention.
“Nothing? Look.” Issy’s finger pointed at the scar on his neck.
It’s very old.
“It’s very old,” Charlotte repeated his words.
“How do you know it’s old?”
Since Charlotte didn’t actually know what her niece was talking about, she realized that she should have kept her mouth shut. Now, following Issy’s glance, she looked at Madan’s neck.
Madan wanted to turn away, but Issy stopped him.
“Did you have an accident?”
For the first time, Charlotte realized that the line on his neck was a scar.
“Is that why you can’t talk?”
Embarrassed, Madan shrugged and hung his head.
Hema, who was not pleased to see the tailor suddenly attract the attention of his Miss Isabella, announced that the tea was almost ready, although he hadn’t even started, and Charlotte diverted her niece’s attention by asking her about her special telephone, since she felt it wasn’t appropriate to discuss a person’s handicap in his presence.
1952 Bombay ~~~
THE GLEAMING BLACK Rolls-Royce stops in front of their house.
“They’re here!” Charlotte calls upstairs. There is no answer. She runs up the stairs. “Peter, they’re here. Are you coming?” She goes into their bedroom, but he’s not there, or in the bathroom, or in the lavatory. “Peter!”
Downstairs the doorbell rings. The servant opens the door and she hears their visitors entering the hall. She looks for Peter in the guestroom and the laundry room. The servant invites them into the drawing room. She hurries down the stairs and checks the sunroom opening onto the garden, the dining room, the kitchen, and the scullery. She even goes into the garden, to the shed, and the servants’ quarters, but she can’t find her husband anywhere.
“Welcome to Bombay,” Charlotte says as she walks into the drawing room. “It’s lovely to see you again. Couldn’t your father come?”
“No, the minister of Public Works paid us a surprise visit. Father is hoping to build a canal, but he hasn’t been able to get permission, and now it finally looks as if it’s all going to work out.” Chutki sits down on the sofa and begins to tell Charlotte about the problems in the palace and the long journey to Bombay. Her baby brother, who’s sitting next to her, looks around with interest. Behind them stand two nurses wearing white caps, one tall and the other short. Both are staring at the floor.
The boy has grown since she saw him a year ago, Charlotte thinks. She listens to his sister’s stories, but her eyes are constantly drawn to the boy. There’s something unusual about him, something she’s never seen in a child before. She can’t decide if it’s his eyes, his smile, or his presence, but looking at him, a calm comes over her and she almost forgets her concerns about Peter.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“Juice,” says the boy, and he begins to cough.
“We’d like tea,” replies his sister.
The boy looks disappointed.
Charlotte rings and asks the servant to bring tea and a glass of mango juice. The boy grins in between bouts of coughing. The daughter of the maharaja is chatting away about the inconveniences of travelling by car in comparison with a train journey, when suddenly Charlotte sees a foot sticking out from behind the sofa near the window. A foot that she immediately recognizes. Chutki hasn’t noticed her startled expression, nor have the nurses.
“We have a new grand piano,” says Charlotte, and gets up. “Would you like to see it?” Chatting away, she succeeds in guiding Chutki and her little brother into the sunroom. The nurses do not budge from their post until Charlotte tells them that biscuits and tea are being served in the kitchen.
As Chutki plays various pieces on the piano, Charlotte steals back to the salon and kneels down by the sofa, where Peter has taken refuge behind the curtains. Gently she strokes his back, and he begins to relax. “If you don’t want to go through with it, I’ll send them away.”
“No.” His reply is barely audible.
“I can say you’re not feeling well,” she whispers.
“I have to go through with it,” he moans. “I owe it to the maharaja.”
She draws the curtain aside. The sound of Chutki’s unpractised piano playing is audible. Charlotte’s hand slides through his hair. She sees the grey streaks that weren’t there a while ago. He groans like a wounded animal with its leg in a trap. But she has no idea what part of him is caught in a trap. She cannot find it, no matter how hard she tries. “Can you stand up?” She helps him to his feet slowly, like a limp marionette. It’s only then that she sees the little boy standing in the door.
“Did the doctor lose something?” he inquires in a worried voice as he fiddles with the gold chain around his neck.
“Yes,” says Charlotte, “but luckily he’s found it.” She hopes that one day she will find out what it is that he has lost.
~~~
THE HOSPITAL CONSISTS of long, high-ceilinged corridors devoid of people. The sound made by the heels of the two nurses reinforces the uncomfortable sensation that came over her when they entered the building. Charlotte doesn’t see why the operation has to take place now, why it cannot wait until tomorrow morning. But Peter is adamant. He’s already called an anaesthetist friend who’s a known cricket-hater, and with two extra nurses there to assist, it should be a piece of cake.
The elderly doctor at the first-aid station also agrees that there shouldn’t be a problem. “I can guarantee that no one will fall ill before the end of the match,” he jokes as he turns up the volume on his radio.
The enthusiastic voice of the cricket announcer echoes throughout the waiting room: “India zindabad!”
“I just hope Pakistan doesn’t win,” sighs the old doctor. “Then it could get extremely busy here.” He closes his eyes, leans back in his chair, and listens to the game with rapt attention.
Peter, the anaesthetist, and Chutki are already in the operating room. Charlotte waits in the corridor. She toys with the gold chain the nurse took from the boy’s neck when he was placed on the mobile bed. She has never waited in a hospital corridor before. Suddenly she realizes how a father-to-be feels when his wife is about to give birth to their first child. In the background, the radio commentary is audible, along with the cheering of the fans in the stadium.
“The doctor has changed,” says Chutki, who sits down next to her and pulls her coat tighter around her.
Charlotte wishes she could say that things were improving, that it just happened to be a bad day. Although she can’t remember when he last had a good day.
“Doesn’t he want children?” Chutki asks cautiously.
Charlotte wishes she’d stayed home. She hates questions like this. Doesn’t the daughter of the maharaja understand that there is no way she can raise the subject? She doesn’t dare. She knows that she won’t get an answer, that he’ll roll into a fetal position, deaf and dumb to his surroundings.
ALL IS QUIET in the operating room. The anaesthetist and the nurses follow the hands of the surgeon, who performs the necessary procedures inside the boy’s throat, intently and with great precision. He sees that there is more damage to the larynx than he had expected. He is happy that he found the strength to get up and to persevere. He sees that the boy’s eyelids are quivering slightly. He casts a worried glance at the anaesthetist, who nods that everything is in order. Why are the eyelids quivering? Eyelids are not supposed to quiver. The patient must lie perfectly still. Otherwise he cannot con
tinue to operate.
“Increase the dosage,” he hisses.
“It’s just right,” says the anaesthetist.
Peter feels rivulets of perspiration running down his back. Can’t his colleague see that the child is waking up, that life is returning to the boy’s body, that he’s not finished with the operation yet, nowhere near finished? His hands begin to quiver. The anaesthetist mumbles that everything is as it should be, that it’s normal, that sometimes the eyelids do quiver. Peter grasps the scalpel in an effort to control his trembling hand. It is not normal, he’s never seen it before, he knows that someone who is unconscious does not move. They’re like the dead, they no longer feel anything. They rot away like cadavers, they don’t feel pain when someone kicks them, they don’t feel the bullets entering their body, they are devoured by insects and vermin, but they don’t move, they cannot move.
The door flies open, the tall nurse calls to them to follow her, and Charlotte and Chutki are in the operating room before she’s finished her sentence. The anaesthetist stares in desperation at the other nurse as she bandages the throat of the young patient, who is still unconscious.
Peter is standing between them, his whole body is trembling, and his eyes are focused on an imaginary horizon. “It went wrong,” he murmurs, “the operation went wrong.”
THE SHORT NURSE picks the boy up from the aluminium operating table. The tall one is crying. Chutki wants to know what happened, but no one will tell her. The anaesthetist pushes Peter out of the operating room and pulls the blood-stained sheets off the bed. Through the open door, the voice of the cricket announcer echoes through the corridor: he has lost his sense of decorum and he is spitting and yelling in his enthusiasm now that India is on the winning hand.
The nurses are busy transforming the Rolls-Royce into a makeshift ambulance. Chutki has shoved her baby brother in his bloodied shirt into Charlotte’s arms and gone off in search of a working radio so that she can tell her father that the operation has failed. The anaesthetist sits across from her with a crestfallen face, and Peter is crouching on his heels at the end of the corridor. Charlotte looks into the boy’s face. Please, wake up, she prays. Stay alive. She strokes his hair and looks at the bandage around his throat. Carefully she hangs the gold chain with the family’s coat of arms around his neck. She tries not to touch the bandage. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispers. She is aware that the same feeling struck her earlier in the day, when he looked at her. There’s something about this boy. She remembers the gossip that did the rounds of the palace . . . that the boy was doomed to lead an unhappy life because she — a white woman — had inadvertently been the first person to see him. She remembers the nurse’s scream, the fury of the women in the zenana, and the reproachful glances. Please, let it turn out all right. She strokes him and gives him a kiss. I would gladly give my life for you. The boy opens his eyes. He blinks. He looks at her drowsily. She smiles at him. It’s going to be all right, everything’s going to be fine. I promise. He smiles back at her. The stadium explodes. “India zindabad!” screams the reporter; the emergency-room doctor jumps up and dances around in a circle. It’s all going to be all right. Then she sees that the bandage around his neck is turning red. The wound hasn’t been sutured properly! She stands up and is about to call for help when the boy is snatched from her arms and disappears through the outside door, with the two nurses.